2007 Oxford Business & Economics ConferenceISBN : 978-0-9742114-7-3

Predicting Satisfaction with Weekend and Shift Work Schedules

Dr. James E. Martin, Department of Business, & Jenell L. Senter, Department of Psychology,both at Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, USA

ABSTRACT

Although in recent years, there has been an increase in the number of employees working nonstandard schedules outside the daytime hours of the Monday through Friday work week, little research has examined the effects of these schedules on employees, focusing on both shift work and weekend work together. Using Social Exchange Theory, we predictedand found differences among employees’ days and shift scheduling satisfaction, and their predictors. In general, our objective predictors explained a very large proportion of variance (Adjusted R2s from 30% to 57%) in both days satisfaction and shift satisfaction, but the effects of the predictor groups varied substantially among the shifts worked. Among the most relevant findings, meeting preferences in relation to a particular scheduling dimension predicted more satisfaction on the night shift for shift satisfaction than for the other two shifts, but essentially the same days satisfaction for each shift.Further, work-life conflict explained significantly more variance with shift satisfaction than with days satisfaction.

INTRODUCTION

As more businesses operate around the clock in both North America and Europe, there has been an increase in the number of employees workingnonstandard schedules outside the daytime hours of the Monday through Friday work week (Barling & Gallagher, 1996; Presser, 2003; Quinlan & Bohle, 2003).Although many studies have investigated shift work (e.g.,Baba & Jamal, 1991; Jamal, 1981; Jamal & Baba, 1992), little research has examined the effects on employees of regularly working on the weekend and during nonstandard hours, compared to those who do not.In addition, few have examined both shift work and weekend work together (Jamal, 2004; Jamal & Badawi, 1995; Staines & Pleck, 1984). Using Social Exchange Theory (SET) (Blau, 1964) applied to organizations (Eisenberger, Huntington, Hutchison, & Sowa, 1986), we predict that there will be differences among employees’ scheduling satisfaction and the predictors of those attitudes, based on the shift and days of the week they work. Within the three shifts of day, evening and night, we predict employee satisfaction with shift and days worked from their actual schedules and expressed preferences and feelings.Understanding how employees feel about their work schedules is important because having dissatisfied employees may, and usually does, lead to potentially costly personal and organizational consequences (e.g., Muchinsky & Morrow, 1980; Peters, Jackofsky, & Slater, 1981).In this study, we will examine the predictors of employee satisfaction with weekend and shift work schedules in a situation where many employees worked fixed shifts and schedules, which include weekends.

Work schedule patterns

Traditional work hours are defined by a work day from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday, and represent the most common type of work pattern. Shift work is characterized by working hours that are nontraditional, such as evenings or nights, and/or working days of the week that are nontraditional, such as Saturdays and Sundays (Presser, 2003). Having multiple shifts is prevalent for employees in occupations such as protective services, food preparation, and other service occupations, as well as in manufacturing (Beers, 2000). The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in 2004, approximately fifteen percent of full-time wage and salary workers worked an alternative shift (4.7% worked evening shifts, 3.2% worked night shifts, 3.1% worked employer-arranged irregular schedules, and 2.5% worked rotating shifts).

Although many studies have investigated shift work, few have examined both shift work and weekend work together (Jamal, 2004; Jamal & Badawi, 1995; Staines & Pleck, 1984). One aspect of work schedules that has received considerable research attention is night work (Bourdouxhe et al., 1999; Parkes, 2002). Night work has been linked to job dissatisfaction, with individuals working at night being less satisfied than employees working during the day(Furnham & Hughes, 1999; Jamal & Baba, 1997). In contrast,employees working weekends have been found to have significantly higher emotional exhaustion, job stress and psychosomatic health problems (Jamal, 2004). Ruggiero (2005) found the nurses working fewer weekends had greater job satisfaction. Strouse, Carroll-Hernandez, Sherman, and Sheldon (2003) found that direct-care staff members of community-based programs in positions that required both Saturday and Sunday work had much higher turnover rates than those in positions which did not require such weekend work. Further, compared to weekday positions, the programs needed more time to fill vacant positions involving weekend work. These findings suggest that many employees working weekends or night shifts may prefer working a different schedule and may leave their organization if they believe they will be able to work anotherschedule at a different organization.

Hypothesis Development

Because the shifts differ structurally both in terms of the times worked and the days of the week worked,we will base our hypotheses on the three separate shifts. Research has found standard schedules are more desirable than nonstandard schedules (Presser, 2003) because standard schedules do not involve weekend and night work (Demerouti, Geurts, Bakker, Euwema, 2004), and thus have the more highly valued weekend and night hours off. Jamal (2004) reported that those employees who worked nonstandard hours and those who worked more weekend days have significantly more stress and health problems and experience more burnout than those employees that work normal, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., weekday shifts. Over half of the people working on alternative shifts do so because of the nature of their work (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2004). Many of these workers have expressed feeling out of sync with the normal pattern of daily life (Baba & Jamal, 1991; Jamal & Baba, 1992). With the normal work day being 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the United States, a person working an alternative schedule may have a hard time adjusting, while finding time for family, social events, and other personal demands. This difficulty makes shift workers more likely to experience emotional and physical exhaustion.

Among the three shifts (day, evening, and night), it can be argued that day shift employees would experience the least amountof displeasure or conflict as a consequence of working a standard shift that is in line with the normal pattern of daily life. Further, we would expect that the night shift employees would experience the highest levels of displeasure and conflict due to the fact that these employees are working a shift that is most dissimilar to the standard 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. work shift.

From an SET perspective, employees’ work schedules represent a keyaspect of their perceptions of the quality of their relationship with their employer. Applied to employee schedules, SET suggests that the negative features of night and/or weekend schedules may lead employees to view those schedules as less desirable than daytime and weekday schedules, and consequently, feel less attached to, and develop poorer quality relationships with, their employer. From the prior discussion, we propose the following hypotheses:

Hypothesis 1: Satisfaction with the days of the week worked will be differentially explained across shifts.

Hypothesis 2: Satisfaction with the shift worked will be differentially explained across shifts.

Once we have established the differences in day and shift satisfaction for the three shifts, we will examine the predictors of satisfaction for those shifts. We also propose that the shifts will differ on the factors that lead to satisfaction for day and shift.

Building on the work of Conway and Briner (2002) and Krausz, Sagie, and Bidermann,(2000),we usedtwo sets of psychological variables assessing the impact of work schedule-related needs, feelings, and attitudes. These reflect employee perceptions of the quality of the exchange relationship with the employer. Specifically, we use work-life conflict, or work-family conflict, as many refer to it, which can stem from work interfering with family responsibilities (work-to-family conflict) or from family interfering with work responsibilities (family-to-work conflict), with these two concepts being very highly interrelated (Frone, Russell, & Cooper, 1992). We have chosen to label our construct work-life conflict, as it represents conflict resulting from several areas of one’s personal life, not just family. Work-family conflict has been found to be highly related to stress and dissatisfaction in those working nonstandard working arrangements (e.g., Janssen, Kant, Kristensen & Nijhuis, 2003; Mikkelsen & Burke, 2004; Westman, Etzion, & Gortler, 2004).The work of Barton (1994), Lee and Johnson (1991) and Morrow, McElroy, and Elliot (1994), who examined scheduling preferences,suggested that when employees received their personal preferences in relation to a scheduling dimension, they had greater satisfaction with that dimension, and thus a better quality exchange relationship with their employer. Pierce and Dunham (1992)and Staines and Pleck (1984),assessed the interferences caused by a particular work schedule for different personal activities. That research suggests that the fewer interferences a schedule causeswith personal activities, the greater the scheduling satisfaction. The research by Staines and Pleck (1984) also suggests that those working in the evening may experience more work-life conflict than those working either during the day or night because of their difficulty in attending to personal responsibilities during either the day or night, thus leading to greater scheduling dissatisfaction on those shifts. From the prior discussion, we propose the following hypotheses:

Hypothesis 3: Work-life conflict is more related to satisfaction with the days of the week worked on the evening shift than on the other two shifts (day and night).

Hypothesis 4: Work-life conflict is more related to shift satisfaction on the evening shift than the other two shifts (day and night).

METHOD

Data

The data collection was funded by the American Postal Workers Union (APWU) as part of a larger study. Because most mail is posted in the afternoon, most mail processing employees work nonstandard shifts. All full-time career mail processors (N = 245) who were not ill or on leave were surveyed on work time over a two day period. These employees worked in a city in one of three regions of the United States, the Northeast, the Midwest or the West Coast. Overall, 22 percent were assigned to the day shift, 40 percentto the evening shift, and 38 percentto the night shift. Many employees worked on the weekend; only 19 percent did not report having worked on the weekend in the prior month. Sixty-three percent reported working at least once every weekend monthly, and 24 percent reported working every Saturday and Sunday monthly. Further, those on the day shift worked significantly (p < .01) more weekend days monthly (5.67) than those on either the evening or night shift (both 3.66 days).

Measures

Controls. We controlled for installation seniority because that was used to determine what shift and days schedule an employee could work if there was a vacancy. We also controlled for the city through dummy variables created for the three cities in our sample. This allowed us to control for the possibility that exchange relationships differed by city. An additional set of controls is related to the research finding that attitudes have been found to vary based on the number of weekends worked monthly (Ruggiero, 2005). This set of two variables consisted of the number of Saturdays and the number of Sundays worked monthly. Having these controls enabled us both to assess independentlythe effects of weekend work on days and shift satisfaction and to control for such effects on the subsequent concepts we examined.

Shift. Shift was defined by the US Postal Service employee assignments, and was determined by the time of day theirhours were worked. We used the employee’s self report of shift. It was identical to using the Staines and Pleck (1984) classification based on starting time.

Satisfaction with the days of the week worked (days satisfaction). We used a two-item standardized scale (alpha = .87) that we developed through pre-testing with APWU members at a site not surveyed. These were: “I would like to workaschedule that has different days off than the one I currently have” and “I am satisfied with the days I am scheduled to be off from work.”

Shift satisfaction. Shift satisfaction was assessed with a two-item standardized scale (alpha = .83) that we also developed through pre-testing with APWU members. These were: “I would like to work a different shift” and“The shift I work is the best one for me.”

Preferences. Preferences were assessed through three variables. Mail processors were asked if they had made formal requests (abid) to work a different shift and/or to work different days than the previous year. Since the archival records indicated that very few requests to change one's schedule resulted in the desired schedule change, overall such requests were taken as evidence that one's schedule preference was not being met. Additional support for meeting their days of the week schedule preference was assessed by a two-item standardized scale where they indicated their desire to work on the weekend or not (alpha = .67).

Work-Life Conflict. Work-life conflict was measured by five items (alpha = .86) on a five-point Likert type scaledeveloped by Parasuraman and Alutto (1981; 1984) and adapted from Kahn, Wolfe, Quinn, Snock, and Rosenthal (1964).These assessed the degree to which employees felt that their work schedules prevented them from attending to non-work responsibilities or vice a versa, e.g., “I cannot satisfy the demands of my work schedule and my off-the-job responsibilities.”

Analyses. All the hypotheses were tested throughhierarchical multiple regression on both days satisfaction and shift satisfaction. In those regressions, we entered the four different sets of concepts discussed above, and then examined the appropriate statistics (R2 or change in R2).

RESULTS

Desirability of Schedules

Before we couldappropriately test our hypotheses, we needed to establish that employees on the day shift wereindeed more satisfied with their shifts than those on the evening and night shifts, and that working less on the weekends led to greater satisfaction with the days of the week worked (days satisfaction). If those predictions were supported, we could test hypotheses concerning the predictors of shift and days satisfaction. Thus, we ran a one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) of shift satisfaction by shift among the employees in our sample.This was found to be significant (p < .001). The means for shift satisfaction with a 5-point scale were 2.26 for the night shift, 2.75 for the evening shift, and 4.55 for the day shift, all of which differed significantly (p < .001) from each other. Furthermore, as predicted, the employees on the day shift were very highly satisfied with their shift, more so than the other two shifts. To determine if days satisfaction was related to weekend work, we broke weekend work into three logical categories based on the number of weekend days worked, and then ran a one-wayANOVA of days satisfaction across those three categories. With a standardized scale of days satisfaction, the ANOVA was significant across the three categories of weekend work (p < .001).Those working less than a day a week on weekends (.7 days monthly) had significantly (p < .001) more days satisfactionthan those regularly working one day weekly on the weekends, who in turn were significantly (p < .001) more satisfied than those regularly working more than one day weekly on weekends (7.2 days monthly). In addition, as noted above, in our sample there was a confounding of shift and the number of weekend days worked. Thus, we had to determine that this did not affect the scheduling satisfaction of employees on the three shifts. Therefore, we ran ANOVAs of shift satisfaction within each shift across the three categories of weekend work. In all three shifts, there was no significant difference across the three categories of weekend work in shift satisfaction. Thus, the satisfaction with shift was not apparently affected by the fact that employees on each shift worked different amount of weekend days. Thus, because our initial predictions were supported, and because the confounding of shift and the number of weekend days worked did not affect shift satisfaction, we could move to meaningfully test the formal hypotheses.

Hypotheses Testing

The results with regard to satisfaction with the days of the week worked are shown in Table 1. Table 2 shows the results concerning shift satisfaction. In regard to Hypothesis 1,that satisfaction with the days of the week worked will be differentially explained across the shifts, there was little support. The four setsof concepts explain similar and high amounts of variance (adjusted R2) in days satisfaction across each of the three shifts; 57 percent for the day shift and 52 percent for the evening and night shifts. For each shift, working on the weekends, the second set of concepts entered to the equations (after the controls of seniority and city) added to most variance explained (R2) (27% to 36%).The controls and the set of preference variableswere next in order of explaining variance, adding 4 to 9 percentfor the evening shift and 9 to 13 percentfor the other two shifts. The preference variables explained a substantial amount of variance. Finally,work-life conflict only added substantial variance for the evening shift. Thus, even though the objective concepts examined explained over half of the variance in satisfaction with the days of the week worked,there was little support, if any, for Hypothesis 1. In contrast, Hypothesis 2, concerned with shift satisfaction,was supported, with large differences in the variance explained; 37 percentfor the night shift, 30 percentfor the evening shift, and a nonsignificant amount for the day shift.The nonsignificant amount of variance explained for the day shift is likely due to the high desirability of that shift noted above, creating range restriction on the dependent variable. The controls only added significant variance for the night shift. Working on the weekends did not addsignificant variance explained for any shift. However, the preference variables explained a substantial incremental amount of variancefor both the night (16%) and evening shifts (9%). Finally, work-life conflict added 18 percent to the variance explained for the night shift and 9 percentfor the evening shift. Thus, Hypothesis 2 was supported.